Nearly 22 years after his death, it appears to be the image -- the highly personal, ever malleable image -- rather than the memory of Elvis Presley that endures.
"Elvis has entered into the culture in a way that serves everybody's purposes," said author Peter Guralnick.
But Presley was real, a poor-white-trash boy from Tupelo, Miss., and the Memphis slums who became the improbable and perhaps ultimate embodiment of the American dream, even as his life in the end became a nightmare.
Guralnick, a genial, soft-spoken, bookish Bostonian, has written several acclaimed books (mostly about blues musicians and soul music). Basking in soft afternoon sunlight recently in the garden of the Chateau Marmont, he seemed the antithesis of the commanding presence and charisma which defined his subject.
And yet Guralnick set for himself a Herculean task: The de-mythicizing of Elvis Presley.
Many observers say he has managed the feat, with the recent publication of the second volume ("Careless Love: The Unmaking of Elvis Presley"; Little Brown) in what is being hailed as the definitive Presley biography.
It took Guralnick 11 years to complete his mission.
The author takes great pains to concentrate on Elvis the human being and the roads he actually traveled, first with "Last Train to Memphis," (now available in paperback) which chronicled Elvis' life through his Army induction in 1958, and now with the second volume that carries through to his death in 1977.
"The challenge is to try and approach the Elvis who really existed, who actually made music, and to hear the music with unprejudiced ears," said Guralnick,
"But it is very difficult to scrape away the veneer of culture and myth and get down to what is real."
In his first Elvis volume, Guralnick paints a musical and cultural picture of shotgun-shack rural Mississippi and the Memphis projects where Elvis grew up. It is a close, fetid, impoverished world where the Presley family escapes segregated America's absolute bottom rung in the 1940s and '50s only by virtue of the color of their skin.
The surviving Presley twin, the son a common laborer and his overprotective and decidedly unworldly wife, moved like a ghost between the races while growing up in the poorest section of a poor Southern town.
Young Elvis was at ease in black churches and at blues shows; he worshipped gospel quartets, both black and white. And he listened intently to any kind of music he could find on his radio, banging chords on his cheap guitar and dreaming of a career in music and movies, completely undeterred by his surroundings.
It was from this background that the future king of rock 'n' roll set out on his path to the throne, launching a cultural and sexual revolution en route.
"He was absolutely the right person at the right time," said Guralnick. "The music was clearly ready to happen. Had Elvis not come along, you still would have had rock 'n' roll. But I don't think you would have had it focused in such a way."
An inner voice
That Elvis had "it" seems undeniable: He has sold well over a billion records worldwide; his estate still grosses up to $100 million annually; Graceland is the most-visited home in America after the White House; and Elvis performances from 30 and 40 years ago are still remembered with awe by those who witnessed them.
"What made him different is he had an inner voice that he was listening to," said Guralnick.
That voice, he said, provided Elvis with not only a musical vision but also a confidence and identity onstage that was at odds with his natural shyness and religious upbringing.
"I imagine him striking poses in the mirror, trying out different performing styles for an imaginary audience," Guralnick said. "He was, like many kids today, totally absorbed in music."
Based on radio airplay of "That's All Right," Elvis had become a local sensation by July 1954 when he stepped onstage at Memphis' Overton Park.
"He had never performed in any capacity in anything resembling a professional show," Guralnick noted.
Nervous didn't cover it; Elvis was terrified.
He took to shaking his leg.
"It was something he may have developed in front of the mirror, but also he got it from Big Chief, who sang bass for The Statesman (a popular gospel quartet)," Guralnick said.
"Elvis later said the shaky leg came from nervousness; I don't think so. He was a performance artist. He knew what he was doing. Elvis had an extraordinary feel for the audience; he responded to what worked, and what didn't was dropped from the act."
The power contained in Elvis' voice deeply affected listeners, Guralnick said. There was a raw appeal, "a uniqueness and purity to the Sun sides."assuming too much?
"When you hear Elvis do something like `Mystery train,' it just soars, the effect is just pure release," he said.
Shake, rattle and roll
But those who saw him perform live were affected in a more profound and excitingly different way. Fans were overwhelmed by his sexuality; before long, preachers, some parents and policemen and media commentators were threatened by it.
Guralnick blames such response not on Elvis as much as on the agendas of those calling attention to his performances.
"As long as he stayed in the South, you don't see any reaction," he said. "Only when he hit the national stage and became a target large enough to shoot at, when politicians and ministers can make a name for themselves by criticizing Elvis, do you have this moral outrage."
By the mid-'50s, Elvis had outgrown tiny Sun Records. He signed with RCA and did a series of national TV shows.
"Watch the way he changes with each show. Elvis had a unique ability to adapt, and he was an incredibly fast study," Guralnick said of the black-and-white performances available now on home video.
"In the beginning, you see an amateur coming out onstage -- he's even chewing gum -- though he looks like he's shot out of a cannon. But by the time he appeared on the `Ed Sullivan Show' (before 54 million viewers in September 1956), the moves have become, if not choreographed, studied.
"And they elicit an unbelievable response. It's an innocence in a sense, and I don't know how anyone could have maintained it."
Elvis' appeal, from his earliest success to his death, was that he was "the perfect mirror," Guralnick said. "He didn't misrepresent himself, but he allowed people to see in him what they wanted to see."
At the height of his fame in 1956 (arguably the most successful year for any pop performer in history), Elvis had refined his craft to an extraordinary degree, said Guralnick.
But for the rhythm-and-blues purist, he had sacrificed a great deal.
Elvis wanted to be the Bing Crosby of his generation, a singer, performer and movie star with universal appeal, Guralnick said.
"His goal ultimately is to encompass the music of Mario Lanza, of Dean Martin, as well as the music of Arthur `Big Boy' Crudup (who wrote `That's All Right')," he said.
"By the time of `Hound Dog' and `Don't Be Cruel' (in 1956), he has created something that has enormous appeal -- `Don't Be Cruel' is the perfect pop confection," he continued. "But I don't think it has the depth of `Mystery Train,' nor the free-flowing spontaneity."
Are you lonesome tonight?
Presley's by-now familiar story continues through a two-year Army stint (during which his beloved mother dies), a string of increasingly awful movies and a dormant period, musically, through the mid-'60s in which the Beatles and the sex-drugs-rock-'n'-roll counterculture that he himself had wrought prevailed.
Astonishingly, Elvis submerged himself into New Age religion and philosophy in a little-known spiritual search that smothered his creativity, said Guralnick.
He resurfaced in 1966 with a remarkable gospel album, enjoyed a renaissance with the 1968 "Comeback Special" on NBC-TV, dazzled audiences and critics with his 1969 Las Vegas performances, turned out a new batch of hit records and then hit the road to more rave reviews.
But within a few years, Elvis was bored with touring and disspirited in general -- seemingly tired of life itself.
Elvis had used amphetamines since his Army days to enhance his incredible energy, Guralnick said, playing and working at an extraordinary pace.
"But clearly from 1973 on, you see an Elvis who was out of control, an Elvis incapable of dealing with the world," he said. "The drug use from that time on was different both in quantity and kind from anything that has gone on before."
Elvis becomes a self-taught expert in the American pharmacopeia and in manipulating medical personnel, friends and family to help him churn out prescriptions; not just uppers and downers, but heavy-duty painkillers and depressants.
"They are for obliterating reality and they are far more a symptom of the problems he had than the cause of them," Guralnick said.
"By then, it was very clear what the outcome of the story would be, clear to all the people around Elvis. But Elvis' answer to every person who tried to confront him and get him help was the same: If you don't like it, there's the door."
Elvis, the golden boy who could have any treasure or pleasure with a finger snap, almost certainly suffered from clinical depression, Guralnick said.
The source of his depression, be it organic and perhaps hereditary, was eclipsed by stories about Elvis' behavior in his final years: the astonishing weight gain; the drug use; the paranoia; miserable stage performances; shooting out TV sets and windows; impulsive consumption of every imaginable sort.
But Guralnick notes his vast base of fans always forgave him, just as they connect with him still.
"These are people who came from the same background, the working class, and who are dismissed in the same way Elvis was from the national stage for reasons of class and accent," said Guralnick, who's embarking now on a biography of the late soul singer Sam Cooke.
"You go to Memphis at the anniversary of his death and it's the same people returning. You find them asking after each other, finding great satisfaction in a shared community and a shared enthusiasm and in a place, Graceland, where they can be safe from ridicule.
"We live in an age of diminishing communities. I find the idea of an Elvis community much more valid than that of an Elvis religion."
It has been widely reported that Elvis Presley died in 1977 from cardiac arrhythmia, an irregular heartbeat, possibly brought on by drug dependency, obesity and a weak heart. But the music legend's longtime friend and physician, Dr. George “Nick” Nichopoulos, has put pen to paper for the first time and revealed his belief that it was chronic constipation that actually killed the King of Rock and Roll.
“After he died we weren’t sure (of the exact cause of death) so I continued to do some research and I had some doctors call me from different places and different med schools that were doing research on constipation and different problems you can get into with it. I just want to get the story straight – it all made sense with the new research that was done,” the now retired Memphis M.D told Pop Tarts. "Dr. Nick" was by Presley's side for the last twelve years of his life and tried to resuscitate him the day he died. He recently released the book “The King and Dr. Nick” about his time with The King, and his theory on the death that shocked America.
“We didn’t realize until the autopsy that his constipation was as bad – we knew it was bad because it was hard for us to treat, but we didn’t realize what it had done," the doctor explains of Elvis' condition. "We just assumed that the constipation was secondary to the meds that he was taking for his arthritic pain and for his insomnia.”
According to Dr. Nick, the autopsy revealed that Presley’s colon was 5 to 6 inches in diameter (whereas the normal width is 2 to 3 inches) and instead of being the standard 4 to 5 feet long, his colon was 8 to 9 feet in length.
“The constipation upset him quite a bit because Elvis thought that he could handle almost anything, he thought he was really a man’s man and he wasn’t going to let something like this … he thought that this was a sign of weakness and he wasn’t going to be weak,” Nichopoulos said. “And it’s not the kind of thing you table talk. Back in the ‘60s and ‘70s you didn’t’ talk about constipation much, you didn’t’ hear people complaining about it, or saying what they did or how much trouble they had with it.”
In 1975, the primary treatment for this kind of problem involved removing part of the colon, known as a colostomy, and at the time Dr. Nick was in talks with a surgeon at the University of Memphis to perform the procedure. However Presley’s “ego” got in the way.
“He would get embarrassed, he’d have accidents onstage. He’d have to change clothes and come back because of the way we were trying to treat his constipation,” Nichopoulos said. “So if they had done the colostomy then, he’d probably still be here. But it wasn’t acceptable treatment at that time. Now the treatment is short.”
Nichopoulos also believes that Presley’s prominent weight gain in the years prior to his death, was not a result of overeating or eating the wrong foods, as they initially assumed. The doctor reveals that Elvis' bloated appearance was due to his severe constipation.
“It was really a physiological problem. During the last few years we were going back and comparing pictures, some of them were taken just two weeks a part but he looked like he’d gained 20 pounds when the only difference was that he had a good healthy bowel movement and then lost a lot of weight from that,” Dr. Nick explained. “Usually you pass it all in two or three days, but at the autopsy we found stool in his colon which had been there for four or five months because of the poor motility of the bowel.”
So how would Presley feel about all the details of this “debilitating” disease being made public?
“I still think it’d be embarrassing for him, but that may be because we couldn’t explain it at that time the way we can now. But bowel paralysis is hereditary and you can in fact pass it down to your children,” he continued. “His condition was either something he was born with like Hershberger’s disease, or some viruses cause the paralysis of the nerves in the colon. The nerves weren’t functioning enough in places, or weren’t functioning at all because his colon would not push food out, it would just accumulate.”
And even through all the trials and tribulations of their personal and professional relationship, Nichopoulos will first and foremost remember the captivating yet compassionate person that was our beloved American icon, Elvis Presley. “He was well-written, a very kind person, a very giving person. He was just one of a kind. You couldn’t ask for a better friend,” Dr. Nick added. “The main thing that he enjoyed in life was doing his shows. He would change from one person to another as soon as he walked on the stage. He would just go through a metamorphosis – all of a sudden he flipped a switch and looked like a toy soldier dancing up there.”